Two hours ago I matched on Hinge with a decently handsome Catholic boy with dark curly hair. He’s a materials science major who works at “Space.” I joked that he must work on Page Mill Rd (aka the epicenter of all things evil, iykyk), and he replied, “haha no I work at Lockheed.”
LOCKHEED??? My moralistic instincts went off and I unmatched immediately. How do you claim to be Catholic and work at Lockheed Martin? At least I’m only three or four degrees of separation from evil!
But then, while texting Joe and Albert about how morally unjust this was, I stopped. Hold on. When the Lord comes back for the Final Judgment, would this dude actually be considered more evil than me? Do I get the moral high ground of being “less evil” for not working at Lockheed, even though I’m actively provisioning instances for datacenters?
On September 28th, I attended a liturgy hosted by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State. During the youth sharing, someone asked what we should do when our work doesn’t align with our values. The cardinal admitted it was a difficult question, then compared it to soldiers in a war. It is obviously not okay to murder, but if the war is to protect your nation, or to stop evil from spreading (Nazism, for example), is killing still immoral? The Church’s views here are famously tangled.
Okay, let’s dial that down. This is about tech workers, not people directly killing people. I’m a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, where I help build and maintain the networks inside datacenters. I push code for the infrastructure of Important Networking Stuff and work on builds regularly. Very, very big girl job. But I keep thinking: dang, aren’t datacenters lowkey evil? Is there blood on my hands?
So I did some research on how the Church categorizes this kind of thing. There’s formal cooperation, where you share the evil intent and go along with it anyway. Then there’s material cooperation, where you contribute to something without intending the harm. Material cooperation can be permissible, depending on how serious the harm is and how close you stand to it. That’s the “degrees of separation” from my joke, except it turns out to be a real theological concept.
By that framework, I’d like to think I’m remote. I write network code, not the models. I don’t want anyone harmed. But “remote” is doing a lot of work in that sentence for someone who provisions the instances. And to be fair to myself, datacenters aren’t inherently evil. They also host your Hinge matches and your grandma’s photo backups. A missile has one job. But even that comparison gets messy, because the Church does have a tradition of legitimate defense. So the Lockheed boy may be doing something the Church actually argues about, not something it flatly condemns. Which means I unmatched a man for a sin I hadn’t properly diagnosed.
Almost all my friends from college work on datacenters one way or another. Some make chips, some design hardware, and some (the super cracked ones) train the AI that runs on them. And anyone with a phone is a customer. When I say you can’t escape datacenters, you really can’t.
I knew I wanted to work in tech since I was 13, but I never expected to be a maid to datacenters. Or maybe my young, naive mind didn’t understand what I was signing up for. (This isn’t a critique of the tech industry at large, btw. I’m writing an even more scathing piece on that.) Now I find myself thinking about the ethics of building a technology that could lead to the destruction of humanity.
Two of my best friends, Joe and Albert, are both in tech, both not religious, and have opposing views. Albert is uneasy about being an engineer at an evil tech company. He thinks we have to suppress our consciences to be part of something that might doom us, that we’re playing an active part in “working for evil AI,” and that if there’s a hell for tech people, we might end up in it. (Lord, if you can hear this, please don’t put me oncall.) Joe is more fatalistic. The future of AI, datacenters, and humanity isn’t up to us, and if we don’t build it, someone else will. We’re just the smart Berkeley chuds chosen to build the thing that may or may not kill us all, droplets (haha, AWS people iykyk) in a wave that’s coming regardless. Our little protests will do nothing in the grand scheme of things.
I’ll give Joe this: he’s probably right about the wave. But I’m not sure “someone else would do it anyway” has ever worked as a defense, least of all in a tradition that takes responsibility this seriously. The Catechism’s list of ways we share in other people’s sin is uncomfortably broad. I can’t tell whether that makes Joe wrong or just makes his argument beside the point. Albert, meanwhile, has the guilt but not the follow-through. Guilt with no action attached is just a mood.
I land somewhere in between, torn between my former leftist self and the tech yuppie who cares about career gains. I don’t know if building datacenters warrants hell, but I feel kind of bad when it’s 90 degrees out in October. I made a choice to work in this industry, and I play an active part in it.
Which brings me back to the Hinge boy. I unmatched him in four seconds, no questions asked. Someone had just asked a cardinal the exact question I could have asked him, and I swiped instead. Maybe the more Catholic move would have been to ask how he squares it. Maybe he has a better answer than I do. Maybe he’d have turned the question around on me, and I wouldn’t have had one. I suspect that’s why I unmatched.
I still don’t know how to end this. I don’t have an answer. I just know I’m trying to think beyond my career and my paycheck, which is why I go to things like AI Philosophy Night. And as someone this Catholic-guilt-ridden, I really do want to do more good than evil in this world. So for now, I’ll keep doing what Catholics do best: examining my conscience, loudly, on the internet. The question stays open.